ABOUT

Through his pencil drawn portraits, Brian Finn, a Montreal based graphic designer and illustrator, builds a bridge between the bold rhymes of the music and the toughness, if not to say the crudeness, of its performers.

Some of his characters display a tremendous sense of confidence. Brian Finn’s stroke grasps what we call “attitude”, and what in French can be described a level of hauteur. We find it present in the posture between bard and poet - typical to theater characters - that the singers adopt.

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In the term hip hop, hip means cool, flippant; hop stands in for dance. Once considered the rhythm of New York’s black ghettos in the 1970s, this music - with its videos - has now become the anthem for youth around the world. On YouTube, the “hits” that videos by Drake, Snoop Dogg and Easy E receive are counted by the tensof millions.

Brian Finn draws his portraits to the beat of hip hop, the volume raised to the maximum, to sketch out each of the twenty performers represented at this event. He explains: “You can see their disposition in their eyes. The white dot in the pupil expresses their attitude. When I move that dot, their facial expression changes.” Finn operates within the method of photorealism with a touch of expressionism, which lands in a sort of hyperrealism. The spontaneity of the artist’s lines grasps Easy E’s grotesque side, with his two hand guns crossed in front of him, as well as Jay Z or Notorious B.I.G.’s threatening stare.

Finn States: “Let’s not get it twisted, Mary J. Blige sings about love. Common condemns poverty. Talib Kweli, a Muslim, speaks of poetry.” Hip hop’s history, the cultural expression of an oppressed group redeemed by the very powerful recording industry, is a history of metamorphoses. These metamorphoses can be viewed as masks. All hip hop performers use pseudonyms, and the attitude of misogynistic defiance that many of them exhibit steams equally from temperament as from a requirement of the music industry. Ecce homo.